Art and about with Year 7

Who has been to the National Gallery of Australia?This question, which I ask students in preparation for our termly visit to the NGA, generally reveals that some Year 7 Radford students have not been to the gallery before.

Fun fact: National research suggests that, outside of school hours, 31 per cent of children aged 12–14 years attend art galleries. Children in the ACT are more likely to visit a gallery than children in NSW.

John Falk, Sea Grant Professor of Free-Choice Learning at Oregon State University, asks: 'Any (art) museum can get somebody to come once, but can you get them to come ten times? What would it take to create a 21st century museum where visitors came 50 times in a year?'

With the enthusiasm and eagerness demonstrated by students viewing the diversity of works on our recent excursion, I guess that many will want to go again ... soon.

Comments about the experience include:

• I got to see the painting that I have been doing as a collaborative (appropriated) painting at school and many other amazing artworks.• We got to see the real size of the paintings and the little details we might have otherwise missed. We learnt all sorts of things including that John Glover's painting has a cool frame (large, historic, carved, gold and detailed) and that in John Olsen's large, colourful, abstract painting there is a self-portrait.• We saw 'our' painting up close in the Gallery and it was really small, compared to what I thought it would be ... a grand landscape.• We saw a lot of artworks and they were all interesting yet different. My favourite historical Australian painting included two women and we discussed fashion of that time.• I found the stories behind the artworks interesting and how the artists saw the world and how different it is today.• I enjoyed looking at all the Australian paintings of landscapes, particularly the ones of the outback.• We hadn't noticed before the visit that our painting of Mt Kosciusko by Eugene Von Guerard, had little people in it.

Why not consider visiting a gallery with your child over the summer break?